Yes, It’s Censorship

77 points by timf 2 years ago | 43 comments
  • CM30 2 years ago
    Thank you, this is something I've said for ages now. If a company has an almost defacto monopoly and stops people from talking about something, it's effectively the same as a government doing it. And when about 98% of internet communities are hosted by and controlled by large corporations, the whole 'go elsewhere and start up your own service' thing feels kinda clueless, as if it's deliberately ignoring how powerful network effects are.

    It's also clueless because it's extremely difficult to run a business or service online if your views/product/service is despised by a large enough percentage of the population, due to every single layer of the stack being controlled by someone that can and will shut down anyone they disagree with. ISPs, web hosts, anti DDOS providers, software providers, domain name registrars, payment processors... all of them think of themselves as the internet moral police, and will boot customers/clients if enough people scream at them to do so (or in the case of things like porn or gambling, because it's 'convenient').

    So running an alternative gets more and more costly and impractical the more controversy you bring, to the point you're probably required to run your own datacentre and networking links if people hate you enough.

    That's not true of a real life business or organisation, which gets services provided by utilities and where (assuming they own the building), only the government could boot them out.

    • dTal 2 years ago
      >it's extremely difficult to run a business or service online if your views/product/service is despised by a large enough percentage of the population

      Well wait a second, is that really censorship? "Censorship" implies to me a small group of powerful and unaccountable people tinkering with the information flow, quite probably in secret. That's not the same thing at all as being hounded out of town because everyone thinks you're a piece of shit.

      • jwarden 2 years ago
        The definition of censorship certainly doesn't entail a small group of powerful and unaccountable people. Below are a couple of definitions I have found online.

        I think people may be more outraged by censorship if it is done by a small group of powerful and unaccountable people. But censorship that is approved of by the majority is still censorship. And it can still be wrong, for the majority is not always right.

        Cambridge Dictionary: a system in which an authority limits the ideas that people are allowed to express and prevents books, films, works of art, documents, or other kinds of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because they include or support certain ideas: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censorsh...

        ACLU: "the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive": https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship

        • CM30 2 years ago
          It's not about what others in general believe, it's the fact the payment processors, ISPs, data centres, etc have an outsized effect on what you can practically do/talk about.

          The electric, water and gas companies can't just decide to cut off everything they don't like because they dislike their political views/actions, why should the tech equivalents be allowed to?

          • joe_g_young 2 years ago
            Should a persons worldview dictate whether or not they perform a service? For example making a wedding cake for a same sex marriage? Perhaps this more nuanced.
          • bilvar 2 years ago
            Or being burned at the stake because everyone thinks you are a witch.
            • dTal 2 years ago
              I'm having trouble discerning your point. Can humans collectively believe harmful things? Of course. But it's a fundamentally different problem than censorship, except insofar as censorship can influence people's beliefs. It's not something you can really legislate against.
          • yucky 2 years ago

                > If a company has an almost defacto monopoly and stops people from talking about something, it's effectively the same as a government doing it.
            
            I would take it a step further and say that since the US Government has special relationships with many companies, they effectively become an extension of the government apparatus. In those cases, rather than letting government outsource themselves out from beneath regulation, we extend regulation as it pertains to government work to the companies doing business with the government.
            • scarface74 2 years ago
              There is no “monopoly” on getting a computer on the internet where you can express your views.

              Parlor’s issues for example is not “censorship”. It is a badly run business.

              • Jiro 2 years ago
                Good luck building your own payment processor for such a company. Payment processors are regulated and you can't just make your own.
                • scarface74 2 years ago
                  If you have anything worth saying and you have “true believers. You can find a way to get around the establishment.

                  That’s the whole idea behind grass root movements.

                  It’s shear laziness or the fact that none of them believe strongly enough to get their words across.

                • jiveturkey 2 years ago
                  Parler

                  as a proper noun i think this is worth correcting

              • jmull 2 years ago
                The problem is, at Doctorow’s Anything Goes Cafe, a bunch of people shout loudly and abusively at other tables, incessantly go table-to-table to sell things, and even organize mobs to attack other tables.

                He’s ignoring this, which makes the essay weak and pointless.

                • poulsbohemian 2 years ago
                  For that matter, I have an issue with the way he paints the list of the most prominent tech companies as though they each have some master agenda and are all approaching speech in the same nefarious way. There's a big spread there such that his approach here does a disservice to the reader.

                  As you point out, there's a lot of nasty hateful speech being spewed, and cooler heads are asking if there's a way to simmer it down. If we believe that such a request is a path to censorship, then perhaps the real answer is that those with different political / social / ideological points of view need to become more aggressive with their counter approach.

                  • andrewflnr 2 years ago
                    Doesn't make it weak and pointless, it's just about a different topic than you wish it was.
                    • plaguepilled 2 years ago
                      This is a subtle mistake but an important one. The correct response to FAANG controlling everything is not to say "aha, so we should clearly wrest the right to moderate from these swine's" but instead democratise the moderation of online public spaces.

                      In other words, legislate.

                      • lern_too_spel 2 years ago
                        To complete the thought, because of this, the other restaurant succeeds and expands, while the anything goes cafe shrinks to just serve the troublemakers. Blaming profit-seeking corporations for seeking profits is pointless.
                        • raxxorraxor 2 years ago
                          This is the oldest criticism of freedom of expression. It could be used for bad purposes. It has never been correct though.
                          • peterashford 2 years ago
                            Hmm... I've heard people from many minorities say that this is their daily lives on social media. I find your "it has never been correct" statement a little hard to believe
                            • raxxorraxor 2 years ago
                              There is tons of derision and conspiracies about the ethnicity I belong to. Doesn't matter to me, doesn't define me. Restrictions to speech will never be done in the name of minorities. This is for the vanity of the masses almost exclusively, especially in our modern times.

                              There is not a single credible example where minorities were suppressed because people were allowed to talk too openly. There are a lot of cases were they were suppressed. And I do not believe this is what you can call a close call.

                              If you find any example at all, I would be interested to hear it.

                          • smrtinsert 2 years ago
                            Yep more petulant whining from the faux marginalized. Nevermind I actually wasted time reading this on a very popular website.
                          • jleyank 2 years ago
                            Gresham’s law applies to discussions as well. There’s two ways to deal with an obnoxious participant: endeavour to eject or mute them or go elsewhere and leave them their empty room. If everywhere on the internet is private space (per the article), then nobody really has a right to be anywhere - my house, my rules. Don’t like my rules, then go elsewhere and set up your rules.

                            Commercial sites need customers, so they have to edit the clientele in order to survive. Smaller sites, commercial or not, are like clubs and they can set their membership rules as desired. The former gets the bland middle ground. The latter handles the edges. Most people will just go elsewhere when faced with noise.

                            • musicale 2 years ago
                              > The 30 year old decision to fully privatize the internet without any public speech forums means that we live in a city without any sidewalks or parks or school auditoriums where the First Amendment applies.

                              The metaphor is interesting but the existence of .gov and .mil domains indicates that the internet isn't fully privatized, while the .edu domain indicates that schools are still on the internet as well. Public schools do seem to have digital auditoriums, and the question of whether first amendment rights are violated in them is an interesting one.

                              I have noticed that many public libraries have web sites. I like Doctorow's idea of having digital town squares and parks as well, assuming they're not ruined by crime, garbage, pollution and advertising, as many physical spaces are.

                              • isitmadeofglass 2 years ago
                                > It’s pretty clear that Anything Goes is a more robust promoter of free expression than No Politics. It’s also clear that when a restaurant manager eavesdrops on your dinner-table conversation and then tells you to shut up because they don’t like your subject that they are abridging your free expression.

                                This article follows the age old and wrong pattern of defining freedom of speech as some absolute freedom based on nothing but it’s name and ignoring context and contents, then calling everything censorship. Imagine if the constitution was explicit about citizens having “freedom of popcorn”. Here made with a stupid name that has no relation to what it is defined as to highlight the distinction between name and definition. This freedom of popcorn would state that the government shall not inhibit the freedom of movement of its citizens without due process.

                                That would be a fairly ok freedom to establish. Essentially saying “the government cannot just put you in jail for no good reason”. Now comes the dumb part. We would then have authors like OP arguing that when their neighbor prevents them from camping in their kitchen, they are infringing on their freedom of popcorn, and are thereby effectively putting them in jail without process unless they let them camp out in their kitchen.

                                • MilnerRoute 2 years ago
                                  The last line...

                                  "The problem isn’t the calls they make — it’s the lack of an alternative when they get it wrong."

                                  But as much as he says that... do we really believe there will ever be an alternative?

                                  • Kim_Bruning 2 years ago
                                    The internet is still changing from year to year. It was totally different 10 years ago, and that was different from what it was 20 years ago. It seems safe to project that it will be different in 10 years.

                                    The nice thing about the internet is that it is a "dumb pipe", actual protocols are determined at the end points. This aside from eg. current web browsers allowing anyone to set up a UI anywhere to do anything at any time.

                                    This means that there were alternatives in the past, alternatives right now, and there will be in future too.

                                  • byyll 2 years ago
                                    I've often seen the argument that freedom of expression is somehow equal to the US constitution. I am glad someone addresses it in a proper way.
                                    • scarface74 2 years ago
                                      > Imagine that every place in the city was privately owned, and again, 90 percent of those places were managed by No Politics Holdings (International) Ltd, and they did not permit political discussion.

                                      And there is no monopoly on being able to set up a web server at a colo and create your own social media website where like minded people can listen to themselves - ie Parlor.

                                      • 4bpp 2 years ago
                                        There kind of is, insofar as you will need Cloudflare if you don't want anyone willing to rent some botnet time to have a veto on your presence and most likely need MasterCard/Visa to pay for your colo. Both of those are subject to the US government, the latter enthusiastically, and have demonstrated a willingness to refuse service based on political preference.
                                        • scarface74 2 years ago
                                          There are at least 10 CDN providers in the US.

                                          Mastercard and Visa don’t habitually keep people from using their networks to make payments. They may stop businesses from accepting payments.

                                          Besides, the “true believers” are willing to send money orders and get other funding.

                                          People these days with unpopular views lack imagination. The entire civil rights movement thrived against a much more hostile environment than Gab. No one is burning down their houses, lynching them etc

                                          • woojoo666 2 years ago
                                            Monopolies don't need to have all the market share, there just needs to be no viable substitutes. And a social network that is tiny with barely any content, is not a viable substitute. Another characteristic is high barriers to entry, which for social networks, includes overcoming the network effect as well as dealing with Cloudflare, Mastercard, etc. It doesn't matter if there are work arounds, if the cost of these workarounds is high, it's a monopoly.

                                            See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

                                      • jacooper 2 years ago
                                        What, Doctorow posing on Medium and not his blog Pluralistic?, why?
                                        • hairofadog 2 years ago
                                          I was wondering this as well. Medium seems opposite polarity from Doctorow.
                                        • root_axis 2 years ago
                                          The discourse around "censorship" has been bastardized to push an agenda. The waters have been muddied so that Elon suspending Kanye on Twitter goes into the same bucket as the Chinese great firewall. If you say "I like social media platforms that ban avowed Nazis" you're bashed over the head with disingenuous rhetoric likening you to an advocate for authoritarianism.
                                          • olliej 2 years ago
                                            • Proven 2 years ago
                                              There's censorship, but it's mostly legal (we'll see of the Deep State gets away with what they've been doing).

                                              There are alternatives, they are just not convenient.

                                              There are no monopolies except for governmental - that's where the game is rigged the most.